So I’m officially on summer break, which means no more lesson planning, no more grading papers, no more kids, and most importantly, no more paychecks. No income sucks, and it will be that way for at least for the next few weeks until summer school starts up. Now I like to think I do a nice job of saving money during the school year, saving enough to get us comfortably by during the summer months without completely emptying our savings account. But as you know, we have a wedding coming up in a year or so, and every penny counts.
It’s just one of the reasons we’ve been diligently couponing and scouring places for sales and deals. And because I am now without a paycheck, it’s time to start cutting down on weekly meal costs (but without sacrificing quality- no Easy-Mac seven nights a week). To do this, we’ve started to use our growing stockpile of supplies to our advantage. Plain and simple, this is the biggest advantage of couponing and why I have devoted multiple blog posts to the subject.
I want to show you the five dinners we had this week, and the cost for us at the grocery store for each meal. Again, one of the main goals of couponing is not to buy on a need basis. The majority of items shown in these meals we picked up dirt cheap, or for pennies, or for flat-out free. That’s why they are in our stockpile.
Now none of these meals are fancy. They are our comfort foods, and that’s why we stockpiled them. One thing you will notice is that a majority of these meals are accompanied by a salad. Grace and I love our dinners with a salad (with feta cheese, red onion, croutons…mmmm…), and it’s something we cannot sacrifice. It’s nice when we get coupons or see sales for lettuce and salads, but even if we didn’t, admittedly, we’d pay full price. I know, bad couponers. So as we calculate the costs for meals this week, we have to include the price of our salad indulgence. This week we spent $3.75 on salad mixes, and another 0.80 cents on red onion. If we break that down into the four nights we had salad, the price per meal for salad is roughly $1.14 for the two of us.
So onto the meals!
Day 1: Spaghetti w/ Meat Sauce, Garlic Bread, and Salad
Dinner Total: $3.14
Day 4: Tacos
Costs: Lettuce ($1.99)
Dinner Total: $1.99
Day 5: Pierogis, Sweet Peas, Stroganoff Noodles, and Salad
Costs: Salad ($1.14), Peas ($1.00), Sour Cream (0.80)
Dinner Total: $2.94
***
Total for 5 Meals This Week: $11.85
Having no paycheck, that’s a number I can live with. Next week we plan on using our stockpile to make black bean and corn quesadillas, pepperoni and green pepper calzones, and Italian parmesan chicken, to name a couple. Oh yeah, and salads. Of course.
~Mikey D
It’s just one of the reasons we’ve been diligently couponing and scouring places for sales and deals. And because I am now without a paycheck, it’s time to start cutting down on weekly meal costs (but without sacrificing quality- no Easy-Mac seven nights a week). To do this, we’ve started to use our growing stockpile of supplies to our advantage. Plain and simple, this is the biggest advantage of couponing and why I have devoted multiple blog posts to the subject.
I want to show you the five dinners we had this week, and the cost for us at the grocery store for each meal. Again, one of the main goals of couponing is not to buy on a need basis. The majority of items shown in these meals we picked up dirt cheap, or for pennies, or for flat-out free. That’s why they are in our stockpile.
Now none of these meals are fancy. They are our comfort foods, and that’s why we stockpiled them. One thing you will notice is that a majority of these meals are accompanied by a salad. Grace and I love our dinners with a salad (with feta cheese, red onion, croutons…mmmm…), and it’s something we cannot sacrifice. It’s nice when we get coupons or see sales for lettuce and salads, but even if we didn’t, admittedly, we’d pay full price. I know, bad couponers. So as we calculate the costs for meals this week, we have to include the price of our salad indulgence. This week we spent $3.75 on salad mixes, and another 0.80 cents on red onion. If we break that down into the four nights we had salad, the price per meal for salad is roughly $1.14 for the two of us.
So onto the meals!
Day 1: Spaghetti w/ Meat Sauce, Garlic Bread, and Salad
Costs: Salad ($1.14), Garlic Bread (full box- $0.50)
Dinner Total: $1.64
Day 2: Grilled Chicken, Green Beans, Pasta Salad, and Salad
Costs: Salad ($1.14), Green Beans ($1.00)
Dinner Total: $2.14
Day 3: Hot Dogs and Salad
Dinner Total: $3.14
Day 4: Tacos
Costs: Lettuce ($1.99)
Dinner Total: $1.99
Day 5: Pierogis, Sweet Peas, Stroganoff Noodles, and Salad
Costs: Salad ($1.14), Peas ($1.00), Sour Cream (0.80)Dinner Total: $2.94
***
Total for 5 Meals This Week: $11.85
Having no paycheck, that’s a number I can live with. Next week we plan on using our stockpile to make black bean and corn quesadillas, pepperoni and green pepper calzones, and Italian parmesan chicken, to name a couple. Oh yeah, and salads. Of course.
~Mikey D
5 comments:
So you got spaghetti, meat sauce, chicken, pasta salad, hot dogs, mustard, taco shells, whatever goes into a taco besides lettuce, pierogies, and stroganoff noodles for free?! How?? Did you just combine manufacturer's coupons with store discounts?
Also, a lot of the foods that one can stockpile have preservatives. Is there a trade-off in stockpiling and eating foods with a lot of preservatives? I'm not trying to accuse anything - just a theoretical question. Perhaps you were thinking one step ahead and included the salads to get some vegetable nutrients.
Like I said, free or virtually free. Spaghetti, mustard, pasta salad- definitely free. There is always a sale for those items, and coupled with a manufacturer's coupon, you can get them free most of the time. We actually just went to a grocery store and grabbed 6 boxes of pasta for free!
The rest of the items were all cheap when we bought them. The pierogies, for example, were on sale, we had a manufacturer's coupon, a store e-coupon, and if we bought three, we got a free gallon of ice cream.
With things like chicken and meat you have to find ways to drive the price down. We never buy chicken unless it's BOGO or on sale for a super low price. If you can get chicken for $6-7, and it's BOGO, that's great savings. Get a coupon to boot...now you're rolling. Also, meat has a short expiration. Usually if you get close to the expiration date, the store will put it on sale to get it off the shelf. We sometimes take advantage of this and throw it in the freezer for later.
Agreed on the preservatives. Grace and I both like our veggies (her defintely more than me), and it's something we don't sacrifice for at the store. We will never be like the couponers on TLC with $0 budgets because we do spend on lettuce and other veggies and fruits. Our total bill was not $11.85 at the store, that is just how much we spent on dinner items we needed. We still bought things like yogurt, carrot sticks, strawberries, etc. (granted, all with a coupon =)). So you try to balance it out.
I am always on Mike about eating healthier... trust me. We definitely try to limit our stockpile items to things like pastsa and rices. Grains that you probably will eat no matter what (more often than not WHOLE GRAINS)
However, there are tons of coupons out there for fresh produce, yogurt, and other dairy items that help us keep the cost for those things down.
For example, I'm not very picky about my milk except it needs to be skim or low fat. We started getting coupons for the smart balance brand milk that retails for $4.49 per half gallon. The coupons were $1.50 off and our store had them on sale for $2.50.
So we got my milk for $1.00. Compared that to the $2.89 for regular old skim, we made out pretty damn good. Plus the smart balance milk has a longer shelf life so I was able to pick up a few.
See, I don't think my stores let you combine e-coupons and manufacturer's coupons. I read on Kroger's website that they don't and I don't think Giant Eagle does either. Also, a lot of coupons I'm finding are "limit one".
Where do you get most of the good manufacturer's coupons? Sunday paper? Because we don't get one and I don't think it makes sense for us to start getting it just for the coupons.
How much will you stockpile perishables? Like sour cream, for example? Does that alter your eating habits? Do you end up eating more sour cream so the 5 tubs don't go bad?
No biggie on the e-coupons. Even though you cannot combine them, you do get quite a few of them! I noticed on their website they have five pages worth, compared to Giant's (our grocery store) one page. That's probably why they don't let you combine; because you do get a wider selection of coupons to use. There's the trade-off.
Buying a paper subscription makes all the sense in the world. Every week the value of the coupons sent out are worth more than a year-long subscription. Multiply a week's savings by 52, and you are more than paying for the cost of the paper. To put it in perspective, Grace and I used $40.29 in manufacturer's coupons this week.
Or...you can go to Coupons.com, and they have most of the coupons you'll find in the Sunday inserts. The only downside is they don't have the full selection you'll see in a Sunday paper, and you have to print them off.
Grace also finds a lot of deals from websites. A couple she visits are moneysavingmom.com and hip2save.com. There's also an Ohio blogger (she lives in Columbus) who finds a lot of the deals for Ohio grocery stores. Her website is stretchingabuckblog.com. Check them out. She does Kroger and Giant Eagle.
Haha, we have yet to alter our eating habits, and not once have we bought five tubs of sour cream (or anything of the sort). We love using coupons on perishables, but we buy them in limited quantities so nothing goes to waste and so we don't have to change what we eat. It's through the non-perishables...your pantry items...that you get a lot of the free stuff, or the money makers (overage you can use on perishables).
Buying things like chicken, hot dogs, and hamburger on sale and freezing it (and using it for spaghetti and tacos, like last week!), or things like coffee creamer and Grace's milk- things with a later expiration date- are about the only perishables we stock up on.
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